


Paraquel

by Polly_Lynn



Category: Castle (TV 2009)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Family, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Grief/Mourning, Partners to Lovers, Romance, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:06:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25459783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: There is a story he has not told to anyone, he has not told her. There are two stories, both locked inside him.
Relationships: Kate Beckett & Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Richard Castle
Comments: 7
Kudos: 18





	Paraquel

**Author's Note:**

> Early Season 4, Probably in the Heroes & Villains/Headcase timeframe. 

There is a story he has not told to anyone, he has not told _her_. There are two stories, both locked inside him. 

He has imagined a hundred times telling them in anger. He has spent a hundred long nights rehearsing exactly how he would throw the revelations in her face—a one-two punch, her captain, her own father, both convinced that he and he alone could convince her that her life is worth something. He has spent one hundred long nights imagining himself bitterly holding for laughs at the ludicrous idea that he is anything to her.

But he hasn’t told her in anger. He hasn’t told her in any of the shifting shadows of his emotional state since she thunked a copy of a different story entirely down on the table before him. 

The stories are still locked inside him, a discomfiting state for a man who lives to tell them—who lives to tell them to her, for her, about her, and these two are all of the above. It’s certainly for the best in this case, though. These stories are complicated. They shift and evolve. The content is fixed, and yet each is a work in progress in his mind and in his heart. 

He thinks, when the time comes, that he’ll tell her the second story—the one that happened second—first. It’s the one that hurts his heart more, but it’s also the one that she, without knowing, has shown him how to understand, how to learn the lesson of. 

He has been angry not just with her, but with Montgomery. He has been disgusted by the way this man who was supposed to be a friend and mentor to him—a second father to her—had used him. Roy Montgomery had taken full advantage of the heart he has always worn on his sleeve to try to save himself. 

He has, in his darkest moments, hated the man for that. And he has been grateful for the very same thing—the levers Montgomery had pulled to place him in that hangar, twenty-eight declined calls, notwithstanding. He has lamented the fact that he never got the chance to thank his friend for, in the end, trying above all things to save her, purity of motive be damned. 

And he has, in time, come to forgive. It is a pall lifted from his heart by the light of her example—by the choice she made in one of the most devastating moments of her life. _Sir._ _I forgive you. I_ forgive _you._

He has been—he _is_ and almost certainly will be for some time to come—so many things when it comes to Roy Montgomery. The might-have-beens and almost-victories hurt his heart, and still he longs to tell her the story. He longs to spend one hundred long nights, telling her in hushed tones that Roy Montgomery loved her, that he saw with clear eyes what the two of them were and would be to one another. 

With her father, it’s different. For all the tangled tragedy of Roy and his end, when it comes to her father, things are infinitely more complicated. That’s partly why the first story, he thinks, will come second. 

There’s anger here, too, or he’d long thought there would be. Jim Beckett left her. He abandoned his nineteen-year-old, half-orphaned daughter in favor of the bottle—and courtesy of his Meredith-related hair trigger, to say nothing of the more questionable moments of his own childhood that he and his mother haven’t so much dealt with as simply moved past—he has long braced himself for steely politeness toward her father, should their paths ever cross. 

But the reality turned out quite differently. 

Far from needing to manage his icy tone, he had found himself frozen abject terror the moment Jim Beckett briskly stated his name and intentions. A part of him is still so in shock that most days he expects to see some ghost iteration of himself standing in the doorway, gawping. 

It’s a funny story, or it could be. He could amuse her with all he went through to shoo an all-too-curious Alexis upstairs, then trying to hide his sweaty palms and keep his voice level. And after a conversation that was too brief for him to find his footing at all, the bobbing and weaving he’d done as his mother pressed for details he would never have shared in a million years. He thinks on some of the hundred nights he tells it to her, it will be a funny story. 

But it’s so far beyond just that—the curious and amusing tale of the first time he met her dad. It’s a story that pulses with such sorrow that any anger he’d envisioned harboring was gone in an instant. In its place, he’d found nothing but empathy for the man’s unending grief for the loss of his wife. And rising above that, respect for a father’s love so deep he’d knocked on the door of a stranger to ask for help keeping his daughter in the world, knowing full well that the gulf between them, narrower in recent years, remained wide enough to leave him no other recourse. 

He’s only had glimpses of that part of the story—the life she saved. He has only bits and pieces, and he wants to give them to her, piled high on his offering palms. He wants to hold his breath and find the rhythm of _her_ side of things. 

It’s strange how short a time it has really been that he’s lived with these stories. The strands of the two narratives wind all through his heart and mind like hundred-year ivy. They bind together such important pieces of who it is he has decided to be. The time before them, when he kept his intentions—his desires—out of the corner of his eye, seems clouded and alien to him. 

When he thinks now of telling them, his mind conjures intimacy in all its varieties. It conjures a park bench and the sun warm on their faces, her hand creeping toward his as they sneak sidelong glances at one another. He sees a cafe table with a neglected latte in front of each of them, and wine she reaches for from the console table behind his couch where she sits with one bare foot tucked up beneath her. He dares, sometimes—his mind and heart dare—to imagine their breath mingling as they whisper to one another, pillow to pillow in silhouette. 

There is anger, still. There is confusion and injury and grace each of them needs to grant the other. But when he thinks now of telling the two stories locked inside him, he imagines telling them in hope. 

They are, these stories, a burden to bear and a treasure to guard. They are locked inside him for now, but sometimes— _sometimes—_ there passes between them a smile, a glance, a quickening of heartbeats, and he thinks it won’t be long. Sometimes, the first of those hundred long nights doesn’t feel at all far off. 

**Author's Note:**

> I was trying to get an idea that I’ve had sketched out for a while to work. I began this just trying to question myself about what I wanted to do there and how that idea would work as a story, and then Brain Poneh ran off, as usual, and there was this. Which doesn’t really work. 


End file.
